


brick, stone, wood

by oreoni



Category: BTOB
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Fairy Tale Elements, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Supernatural Elements, Witches
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-06 22:33:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12827523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oreoni/pseuds/oreoni
Summary: The werecat thumps against his balcony from his roof for the seventh time that night, and Hyunsik sighs. The first three times he’d been concerned and had offered to let him out the front door, but the werecat-turned-naked-college-age-boy had frantically waved him off and popped back into his little cat form and slipped back onto the roof. Now, Hyunsik really can’t stand the thought of leaving his nest of blankets that he’d warded against the cold, and Minhyuk isn’t even home to open the door for him.





	1. Chapter 1

The werecat thumps against his balcony from his roof for the seventh time that night, and Hyunsik sighs. The first three times he’d been concerned and had offered to let him out the front door, but the werecat-turned-naked-college-age-boy had frantically waved him off and popped back into his little cat form and slipped back onto the roof. Now, Hyunsik really can’t stand the thought of leaving his nest of blankets that he’d warded against the cold, and Minhyuk isn’t even home to open the door for him. 

 

Speaking of, he’s late for their dinner date again. Hyunsik hadn’t even bothered putting their food in stasis this time-he knows he won’t be awake long enough to maintain it before Minhyuk makes it home, and there’s no use in wasting energy. Around hour two he’d pushed one of Minhyuk’s favorite potion-proof mugs off the counter out of spite, but felt bad and had Peniel mend it. He’s sitting with his great white head in Hyunsik’s lap, having forgiven him for the cup immediately and deciding to commiserate. But the boy is still on his patio and hasn’t popped into his human form yet, which Hyunsik remembers having some kind of implication when Minhyuk had lectured him about the care and keeping of Peniel. Hyunsik sighs and clips the thread of energy feeding into the circulation of the warm air, scratching Peniel behind his ear before floating the door open. 

 

The sight of the cat laying prone on the cold concrete drops something in his stomach and he brings him up to his chest and wraps him in the hearth magic he maintains the tower with. The boy is cold and larger than Hyunsik had originally light, but so thin that it’s no issue for him to lift him. His heart twists and he hurries inside. 

 

By the time the cat-boy stirs, Hyunsik has the food reheated and his favorite cure-all on the stove. He’d been trying to feed him eyedropper-fulls, which had been terrifying because he kept having to clear his airways, but it had been worth it when his body regained warmth. Peniel had tried to maintain his human form to help, but it’d been too difficult without Minhyuk and he settled for bringing his cushion into the kitchen for the cat to lay on. The cat blinks his eyes twice and grows back into his human body, which is a horrifying process that Hyunsik will never get used to, no matter how many times he sees Peniel do it. Somehow, it’s less terrible when the end result is a healthy, huge white dog, or happy bald man, versus the skinny dirty boy that’s sitting naked in his kitchen. 

 

“Are you a wizard?” the boy asks. Hyunsik blinks in shock, stilling the movement of the spoon in the potion. 

 

“Bit forward, aren’t you?” The boy shrugs. 

 

“No point in not being forward, when I’m here at your mercy anyways. So, are you?” His voice is lively and sarcastic, which reassures Hyunsik and infuriates him in the same breath. This boy practically (kind of, not really) owes Hyunsik his  _ life. _

 

He turns back to the stove. “No,” he says. “If I were a wizard, you’d be dead the first time you fell onto my balcony. If I were a better wizard, you’d be dead before you made it onto my roof. I’m a house-witch. I left you some clothes, Peniel will help you find them.” The boy eyes Peniel’s goofy beaming dog face with trepidation when he woofs at his name. They both watch Peniel stand up and run directly into the entry frame, stagger backwards, and slip over the tiled floor before making it out of the room and bouncing to his room. Hyunsik covers his smile and the boy, reassured, follows him. 

 

Hyunsik fiddles with his necklace and sighs once they’re out of earshot. Minhyuk is later tonight than any other night, and he’d texted him four hours ago that he’d be home soon. He knows he can handle himself but-

Hyunsik’s just a house-witch, okay? He can’t help but worry. Minhyuk is Asian and short and people are dangerous, especially if they find out he’s a witch too. Their link hasn’t flaired up with anything beyond Minhyuk’s tired annoyance and brief moments of homesickness, so he’s probably fine, but. Hyunsik worries. And yeah. 

 

He tries to send a curl of his hearth magic down the link, letting it go with the memory of a dinner and their bed. It’s a long shot; Minhyuk is probably too busy to notice something that small, but he’s perceptive, and Hyunsik is hopeful. 

 

There’s a thump from the bedroom that shakes Hyunsik back into reality. The boy swears and Peniel whines, and Hyunsik is considering being concerned about that too when they both stumble back into the kitchen in one piece. The boy has the shirt on backwards and the fuzzy socks pulled up over the bottom of his sweatpants, but it also looks like he’d washed his face and is much better for it. It surprises Hyunsik how handsome he really is, with wide, serious eyes and a sharp jaw. 

 

“Thank you,” he says. “I’ll be leaving now.” 

 

“Absolutely not,” Hyunsik says reflexively. He knows that voice. That’s Minhyuk’s don’t-smother-me-Hyunsikie-I-can-reach-the-top-bookshelf-myself voice. “I don’t even know your name, and it’s awfully rude of you to leave when I’ve made all this food.” (The food isn’t for him, but it might as well be now. He’s not letting the boy leave when he can still fit his fingers around his forearm.) 

 

The boy hesitates, and Hyunsik smiles wide at him. In his hesitation, Hyunsik can feel the protective magic he laid into the foundation and earth of the building wrap around the boy and stick.

 

“What’s your name?” He asks him gently. 

 

“Sungjae.” He says. His brows are furrowed and he’s intensely confused. 

 

“Im Hyunsik.” Hyunsik says. 


	2. 2

“Don’t,” Hyunsik says, already stabilizing all his vases to grab onto whatever it is Sungjae is trying to topple over. It’s another fucking terrarium, god, that makes it the fourth one in the past hour. How many terrariums do they even own? Hyunsik hates this. He’s a living urban fantasy trope. 

 

“Why do you have so many?” Sungjae asks. Apparently all he needed to forget his trepidation was some good food and a short argument with the laces on his sweatpants, because he’s been poking around the living room like some sort of- well. Like a cat. “I saw a lot in the room, too.”

 

Hyunsik sets down his towel and flicks his wrist to dry the dishes off. “For energy,” he explains. “Spells and other tricks are powered by the energy that my body produces naturally, but that means they become more difficult to hold the farther out of range I go. A self-preserving spell, or cyclic charm requires a sort of battery to maintain itself. Plants are usually ideal for this, because it’s not taking any of the energy that an animal or person would use in motion, and plants can stay healthy even with a long term drain. They just don’t grow as quickly as they would naturally. Oh, that was so rambly, I’m sorry. Minhyuk is the teacher, not me.”  

 

Sungjae shrugs. “It sounded fine to me. Who is Minhyuk?”

 

“Minhyuk is the other person who lives here. Peniel and he are contracted, I believe.” 

 

“Is he your husband?” Sungjae asks. 

 

“Technically, no.” 

 

Sungjae nods. “And using animal or people energy for the cyclic spells you were talking about earlier is just iffy morally, right?” 

 

“Typically, yes. There are certain spells that people request to feed on them, like wards or other protective magics, just because it’s useful to have around and the energy cost isn’t too unmanageable of a drain. They’re not usually permanent, though.” 

 

“That sounds like a manhwa I read once.” 

 

“What? Oh, Minhyuk is almost here.” Minhyuk comes into range again and Hyunsik feels the little spike of his energy just before he steps into the foyer. Sungjae peers over the rails of the stairs at him curiously. 

 

“So what did you mean by technically?”

 

Minhyuk hears his voice and stares right back at him, half out of surprise and half in exasperation. His face says  _ another one? _

 

“Hello,” His voice says. “Who are you?” 

 

“Yook Sungjae,” Sungjae says. He looks too comfortable leaning against the railing, in a strange home, full of magic that he doesn’t know how to use. He turns back to Hyunsik.

“What kind of spells do you use the plants for?”

 

“Hello, Minhyuk.” Hyunsik says dryly. “It’s 12 a.m. I’d like you to meet my new friend, Sungjae the werecat. He’s staying the night.” 

  
  


Later, when Sungjae’s been shown his room and Peniel’s finally been able to shift long enough to bathe himself, Hyunsik lets the anxiety wash over him. They’re in his and Minhyuk’s room, watching some rerun of an old cartoon, and Minhyuk’s body is very solidly warm and reassuring. 

 

“I missed you today,” He says, hushed. “I even made dinner again, but Sungjae ate it.”

 

“That’s fair,” Minhyuk says. “I’m sorry. I had to stay late.”

 

Hyunsik hums. “Tell me about your day.” 

 

“It was whatever. The kids were fine.” Minhyuk probably doesn’t mean to sound curt-Hyunsik can feel his exhaustion tugging at his consciousness, and it’s been an extraordinarily long day. 

(Still. He’s sensitive.) 

 

“Changsub wanted me to stay late again to look at that strain of vitality leech that’s been getting to his main producers,” Minhyuk continues apologetically, “And it’s really starting to worry him. I’ve been thinking that it has something to do with the sterility of his greenhouse, because most of the plants that he has in there now are past the fifth generation of breeders and don’t do fantastically with any natural energy leeches or drains.”

 

“If you’re right, then that’s an easy fix,” Hyunsik observes. “He could just breed them again with the earlier generations, or new plants that he’s brought in.” 

 

“Mmm, hopefully.” 

 

“But if that were the case, Changsub wouldn’t have asked for your help. He could have figured that out by himself.”

 

“I think Changsub isn’t telling me something about what he’s doing with his harvests,” Minhyuk agrees. “He had all the standard paperwork for the spells that he performed with the first three generations, and records of where he stored any excess, but all that disappears into bureaucratic language from the fourth gen onwards.” 

 

“And that’s why you were so late? Going through his paperwork?” 

 

Minhyuk grins. “Yeah. I’m not super worried about it, though. I trust Changsub enough to know that whatever he’s doing, it’s probably just too eccentric to be approved by administration quickly.”

 

“Changsub, being harmlessly strange?”

 

Minhyuk giggles. “It’s almost like we don’t know him anymore.” He yawns widely, right in Hyunsik’s face. “Oh god, I’m so sorry.”

 

“Don’t worry about it. It’s late.” Hyunsik tightens his arm around Minhyuk and all the lights in the tower turn off. Everything is the way it is supposed to be; Peniel and Sungjae are falling asleep, two bright lights easily distinguishable from the hazy gleam of the plants. Minhyuk, right next to him, is already asleep, mind flickering with the day’s activities and memories from his own, stranger consciousness where Hyunsik is not invited. The lab is locked and empty. Above it, the moon is rising, and the growth in the blackhouse glows silvery and bright. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unbeta'd! i'm sure that's fine though none of you are paying me


	3. 3

Peniel watches Hyunsik pluck the seeds from his sunflower heads for most of the next morning as Sungjae chitters at the birds. It’s a Wednesday, which means Minhyuk is awake and out of the house by seven for his lecture at eight and Hyunsik is usually in the lab trying to get weird crossbreeds to grow. Usually. 

 

Today is an unusual day. It’s early September and the shift in the air that Hyunsik was waiting for all year was thick in his throat when he woke. The equinox is near (his farmer’s almanac says the twenty-second) and the sunflowers are drooping, demanding to be lightened. Hyunsik can feel the beginnings of a certain wildness in his blood-the price he has to pay for being so close to nature, he imagines, is becoming more like it. It stirs even though there aren’t many leaves on the ground and almost no birds in the air. The past season’s young is reared and ready to follow their elders to summer in the south. That means Hyunsik has eighteen days until the equinox, and eighteen days to bring the plants inside, collect seeds and fruit, convince the hummingbirds to stay the winter, and start working in the blackhouse again. 

 

He starts with the harvest, which is also unusual. On a normal year, nothing would have gone to seed this early and the garden would still be thrumming with the demand for longer sun hours, but this year, even the cold-tolerant ivy hums sleepily. And the sunflowers were demanding that he collect their seeds as soon as he stepped into the garden, so that’s what he’s doing. 

 

(The atypicality of everything cements his cold fear to his bones. The signs are everywhere-snow becoming rarer, years alternating with early frosts and late freezes, the summers burning the tender shoots of plants he starts late. The Earth is dying, and nobody needs to be a house-witch to know that.) 

 

Hyunsik hums with the morning glories as he plucks seeds. He’ll go through and choose the ones that came from the biggest flowers for next year, save them and find them again in January. The rest will be split- a fourth for the birds, half for his kitchen, and the other fourth for Changsub and Eunkwang when they inevitably eat through their own harvest. The idea of seeing them again lifts his mood somewhat-they are quite the pair. 

 

“Why do you go through with your hands like that?” Sungjae asks, sounding frustrated. “Couldn’t you use a spoon? Or magic?”    
  


“Good morning, Sungjae,” Hyunsik says pointedly. “And I could if I wanted to. Some years I do, if I run out of time. But the plants are alive and they know me, and I take care of them. So I want to be as gentle as I can.”

 

“Your magic isn’t gentle?”

 

“It’s less personal.” 

 

“Can you hear them?” 

 

Hyunsik tilts his head. Hear them? “What do you mean?”

 

“Like, how do you know they care? Do they talk to you? Do  _ you _ talk to them?”

 

Hyunsik considers that. The plants don’t have voices, technically. That would be mentally overwhelming and kind of horrifying. Hyunsik has just grown up using his magic to feel what the Earth feels, and to live with and on the support of his plants. 

 

“I can’t  _ hear  _ them. Well, actually-I guess they do have voices. They don’t speak a language, if you will. It’s like speaking with your mother,” he decides. “Or an old friend, because that’s what you’re doing, actually. She knows you well, and you know her well once you’re old enough to understand her. You don’t need to articulate things to communicate, and since the plants are an extension of that, I know what they’re feeling. I actually try my hardest to feel what they feel, most of the time. Everything I have comes from the Earth, so I do what I can to make sure that I’m not just taking.” 

 

Sungjae looks thoughtful. “You are strange.” He says. “Witch magic is strange.” 

 

Hyunsik pauses in dragging the seeds out of their heads. It almost sounds like- Hyunsik could-

 

“Can I help you?”

 

Sungjae is so earnest and curious in a way that  _ has  _ to have stemmed from his feline background. Hyunsik’s timid thought gets pushed to the side for now, and he focuses on showing Sungjae how to get his thumb behind a row of several seeds and push them. Hyunsik will save the empty heads to light his potion fires and the ashes to nourish next year’s blooms. Everything cycles when things are the way they are supposed to be. 

 

“So, I never learned what you were doing on my roof,” Hyunsik says casually. He wasn’t going to ask Sungjae, originally. Sometimes, especially when you’re a skinny young werecat in the cold with no clothes, you just need a place to stay for the night. Sungjae, however, is now only three of those things, and doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of wanting to leave. The magic of the tower doesn’t (or shouldn’t) stick quite so easily, but Hyunsik knows when he is taken with someone. 

 

Sungjae scratches his head awkwardly (a  _ baby, _ Hyunsik’s heart sings). “It’s kind of a long story,” he smiles. “I guess it ended up pretty great, though, so I hope you don’t mind hearing.”

 

“I like to spend most of my time in shift, so I usually sleep outside, but I have a friend in the University who lets me inside his place when I want to be. Last night it was pretty cold out, and I hadn’t eaten anything for a while, and I had been meaning to visit him anyway because it’d been like a month, so I tried to get into his place but he must have not been home or something because all of his wards were up. One of them kept dropping me on your balcony, which was a little terrifying, because I thought you were a wizard at first.”

 

“So after his wards dropped you on to what you thought was a wizard’s house…. You kept trying to get in his house?”

 

“In my defense, it was cold last night, and I didn’t know that his wards were going to be the same damn spell for every window.”

 

“Well, it was clever of him, if unnecessary. University housing is already warded.”

 

“Oh, no,” Sungjae shakes his head, “He has an apartment.”

 

“Huh.” Hyunsik frowns. “Is his family rich?”

 

“I would say so.” Sungjae laughs. “They’re elves.”

 

Even after Sungjae answers him, Hyunsik immediately regrets the question. It’s just-so invasive and inane. “Sorry,” he sighs. “That was kind of a stupid question.”

 

Sungjae shrugs awkwardly and they finish picking the seeds out of the heads in silence. Once they’ve finished, Hyunsik sets the bags of the mammoth seeds aside and soaks the rest. Sungjae disappears somewhere in the direction of the city, promising to be back for dinner (why, though?). 

 

Hyunsik considers his options. It’s almost noon. He could visit the orchards and vegetable rows, but that would mean making the trek up the hill and speaking to the farm hands, and he doesn’t feel particularly inclined to do either. He could set up the other hummingbird feeders around the field, but he doesn’t have any sugar water prepared for them, and he doesn’t feel like using the stove. But he still needs to do something; the leisure of summer is already fading, and the thrum in his blood is sweetly unbearable. 

 

The blackhouse it is, then. 

  
  


Hyunsik, unlike Minhyuk or Changsub, isn’t licensed to work in the blackhouse, which is inconveniently across the street in Minhyuk’s sponsored laboratory. He doesn’t have any formal qualifications at all, actually, but the plants love him and no one checks to see who goes in or out. Minhyuk is the only person who ever uses the lab anyways, so Hyunsik feels like it’s all justifiable.

 

The inside of the blackhouse is black, naturally. It’s the largest room in the building with no windows and two separate storage closets, for the plants that need complete darkness. The only light at all is the bioluminescence of the flowers themselves, pulsing to attract imaginary pollinators and hapless prey. Hyunsik is always a little unsettled by it. It’s like visiting an aquarium, and moving from the shallow water sections with coral and colorful fish to the deep blue, filled with dead-eyed sharks and terrible beauty. As he walks through the tables and racks of plants, their voices become more foreign and difficult to understand. He thinks of the animals that swim where there is no light, with filmy and unseeing eyes, and shudders. 

 

When Minhyuk had first brought up the idea nearly five years ago, of actually using the blackhouse room the way it was meant to be used, Hyunsik had been beyond wary. The blackhouse meant far more sinister plants, the departure from his comfortable agrarian background, and no Sun. Without the sun, there is no Earth, because there are no plants without the Earth and no Earth without the plants. The weird, magical parasites that they would be raising lived in a world entirely separate from light, and to Hyunsik then, the Earth. But then Minhyuk had taken the pups of Changsub’s midnight aloe and potted them in the same basic soil-perlite mixture they used for all of their succulents, and the familiar sleepiness of newly rooted plants sparked a bloom of warmth and understanding in Hyunsik. All living things are just working to get the things they need to survive. Hyunsik should just be grateful that none of them have moral agendas and higher forms of mental processing. 

 

This is what he tries to keep in mind when some of the more active carnivorous plants begin snapping impatiently in his direction while he’s in the process of dropping some crickets into their cage. He has to retract his hand quickly enough so that the flytrap-dragonstem hybrid doesn’t take the tip of his index finger off with its unnatural, fibrous teeth, but the motion spills some crickets onto the floor. They go hopping every which way, and Hyunsik groans thinking about the vines of the cuttings that he’ll have to pry them from later. 

 

The rest of his time in the blackhouse consists of checking the blooms of the moonflowers and detangling the climbing plants from each other, his hands spread wide over them as his magic slides through their branches and encourages movement. Hopefully, he’ll be able to lean another trellis against the wall and they’ll finally have enough room to fruit. The fruit of the climbing moonflower is rare and something like a cure-all, and Hyunsik is sure that there will be some old nymph or witch auntie who will appreciate it. He hasn’t seen the old ladies in the market recently; come to think of it, Hyunsik hasn’t visited the market for ages. He needs to get out more. Suddenly, Hyunsik realizes that he hasn’t spoken to anybody who isn’t Minhyuk or Changsub-and-Eunkwang since the beginning of the summer, other Sungjae, and he quite literally dropped into Hyunsik’s life for him. 

 

This kind of stumps him. Is he lonely? Can he even be lonely, when he’s surrounded by the voices of his gardens and the hum of the Earth? It’s not like he has nobody. Minhyuk loves Hyunsik just as much as Hyunsik loves him and Peniel, and Hyunsik refrains from telling him nothing. Still, he realizes now that the sluggishness that seems to have invaded his life is because Hyunsik is stationary.  A pool with currents of its own will still evaporate under the sun. 

 

He purses his lips. He still doesn’t quite understand. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> its been a while so here's something that's a little longer than usual! it has been such a difficult and sad few past weeks


End file.
